


Everything is (not) fine.

by NightsMistress



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-21 11:38:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11356737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: Nita and Ronan volunteer to monitor a species while it is in stasis. Given that it's an icy planet as far away from civilization as possible, it really shouldn't be surprising that it is not a coveted job at all. After all, everything is fine and how it should be.Except it really isn't, as Nita and Ronan find out.





	Everything is (not) fine.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MercyBuckets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercyBuckets/gifts).



> This story contains some vague references to Ronan's ordeal as described in On Errantry 2, but nothing particularly spoilery.

If there is something that wizards know, it is that entropy is always running. Ever since the creation of the universe, entropy has been knitted into the very fabric of spacetime; the contribution of the Lone Power Itself back when everything was new. The reasons behind the Lone Power’s actions were a source of ongoing debate, but what was settled was that entropy was running and that all wizards could do was stave off the inevitable heat death of the universe.

Fortunately for the beings living inside the universe, wizards were at times very creative in how they slowed down the effects of entropy. A wizard couldn’t stop entropy, but they could slow it down, distract it with a well-timed “hey, look over there”, or sidestep around it completely.

An example of the last was located at Llirille, a planet located in one of the arms of the Milky Way, circling around the cooling cinder that was once its star. Life could only be sustained on Llirille while the oceans remained liquid; as the star cooled, so did the planet. The Llirillith, the dominant species, would have died with their planet if wizards had not intervened. Their souls were tied with the kernel of their planet, and so if their kernel died so would they.

Or, at least that would have been what happened. Instead, the Llirillith had been ‘rafted’; placed into stasis on their home planet as it cooled, with entropy serving to untie the Llirillith’s souls from that of their planet. The idea was that once a red dwarf planetary system had been found that could sustain life, the Llirillith could move on, and their souls could form attachments with the kernel of their new planet.

Of course, complex wizardries like this require regular maintenance to ensure that things run smoothly. It was not a popular task, even amongst the personality types that were drawn to wizardry. For one, Llirille was located far away from most civilizations, requiring most wizards to cross through several transport nexus to reach it. The time and distance alone meant that it was limited to those wizards who didn’t have other responsibilities closer to home.

The other reason was that the monitoring station was the last holdout of Llirillith technology, and to a wizard with any sensitivity it felt that way too. The monitoring station felt cold, old, and tired, despite the fact that the air had been warmed, consisting of the right mix of breathable gases for most carbon lifeforms to survive, the intensity of the light could be adjusted for a variety of species, and the sleeping bays were easily adjustable for a number of species.

It was a necessary responsibility, but a profoundly uncomfortable one. As such, when Nita Callahan and Ronan Nolan volunteered to go out there for the annual inspection of the wizardries holding the Llirillith in stasis, no one was about to tell them no. _Better them than us_ was the usual sentiment. _Everything has its time, and maybe this is it for that place._ And if no one examined that sentiment too closely to see where — or Whom — it came from, that was to be expected. Llirille’s monitoring station was undeniably unsettling.

* * *

Llirille was a dying planet on the far reaches of the Milky Way galaxy and as such it didn’t really attract tourism. The only people who visited were wizards, specifically those tasked with the annual responsibility of monitoring over a very old rafting experiment and ensure that it didn’t go terribly wrong. Nita knew all of this — it was in the precis she had read before accepting Mamvish’s request — but the realities of traveling so far were dizzying. Literally. Fortunately, the trip was subsidized, as otherwise no one would be able to travel there in the first place.

Still, the last transportation was the worst, and Nita’s head spun as they materialized. She shook her head slightly to clear it and blinked back black spots in her vision. As she gasped for air, she took in her surroundings in quick snatches. She and Ronan had arrived in what she had been told was the observation room. It wasn’t very large, and the small space was dominated by a set of screens that displayed the elegant lines and curves of the Speech communicating the integrity of the wizardry keeping the Llirillith in stasis. There were two chairs in front of the screens, designed for bipedal organisms. The room was otherwise empty. It still felt too small to Nita, and she rested a hand against the warm metallic walls to reassure herself that the space was not closing in.

“We’ve arrived,” she announced once she was sure her voice would be steady.

Ronan was holding himself carefully in place. Nita could sympathize. She felt she was too large for the room, and she was smaller than he was. That said, if she was being honest that wasn’t why she felt like the room was suffocating her. Nita remembered her great-grandmother before she died, though she had been very young at the time, and what stuck with her the most was how fragile she had been towards the end. The monitoring station — and indeed the entire planet — felt like it was declining as well, and that Nita was being overbearing simply by being young and vibrant.

“Well,” Ronan said finally. He was looking around the cramped quarters with the aloof expression Nita knew through experience meant that he was perturbed and pretending not to be. “This will be cosy.”

“Are you claustrophobic?”

“Not particularly.” Ronan cocked his head in inquiry. “Why, are you?”

“No…” Nita said. “Not usually.” She didn’t have a phobia of closed spaces generally, but she was considering that maybe this space may be an exception to the rule. From the way Ronan kept looking around, she thought he might agree with the sentiment if she said it aloud. She chose not to, instead commenting wryly, “I can see why Mamvish doesn’t come out here often.”

“Too right,” Ronan agreed with a laugh. He laid his left palm flat against the ceiling. “I’m not convinced _I’m_ going to fit in here.”

“It’s only for a week.” Nita had meant for this to be comforting. It seemed to work, as Ronan’s vague, unsettled expression became more sardonic. This was familiar territory at least, as Ronan was one of those people whose mood could be gauged by whether he was more or less acerbic.

“That’s what you say now,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “What’ll happen instead is that you’ll start snooping around, wake the Llirillith from stasis, all hell will break loose, and then we’ll be sent home early. In disgrace.”

Nita raised her own eyebrows. “I’m pretty sure that it was you guys who woke up the Martians and got grounded because of it.”

“That’s true.” Ronan conceded the point with a nod. “But that just means you’re due for it. I heard about what you did on your wizardry student exchange program.”

“That wasn’t our fault,” Nita said. “Besides, it’s different this time.” She had meant that it was different because this time the species were in stasis and everything was, by all reports, going as it should be. From Ronan’s wolfish grin, she had made a terrible mistake.

“Ah. It’s Kit’s problem then. Good thing he had to be left at home.”

Nita rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes, it’s all his fault and by no means because the Powers guide us here.”

“Bit of A, bit of B, really. How is he, anyway?”

Kit had caught one of the bugs that was doing the rounds of his and Nita’s school, a nasty stomach bug that made keeping anything down a challenge, and Kit had contracted the more serious variant. There had been talk of taking him to the ER to hook him up to an IV, but fortunately that hadn’t been necessary. He was still weak and in need of rest, but he was at least able to keep fluids down at least.

“Getting better,” Nita said. “He says the doctor says he’ll be right as rain soon.”

“Good to hear. He was in a bad way when I saw him last.” He yawned then and rubbed at his face.

“Timezones getting the better of you?”

“Being awake’s getting the better of me. I don’t even know how long I’ve been awake anymore.”

Nita could sympathize. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been awake herself. She’d been up for several hours before heading off to tidy up some loose ends, and then there had been waiting time between each transit, and adding up the time made her head spin.

_Bobo, how long have I been awake now?_

_Eighteen hours and twenty-seven minutes._

_And Ronan?_

_Twenty two hours and fifty-four minutes._

Nita looked at Ronan sharply. “I thought you were going to sleep in today.” It was, after all, his usual method of coping with the timezone difference between Bray and New York — or at least, that and complaining about the timezone difference.

“I _was_ ,” Ronan grumbled. “There was some coastal issues I had to take care of. Couldn’t wait another minute, apparently.”

“Yeah? What was it?”

Ronan shrugged. “The fish offshore weren’t breeding like they should. I’ll work on it while we’re here.”

“Well, I can help you if you like,” Nita offered. “Two heads are better than one.”

“Sure, okay.” He punctuated his sentence with another yawn. “I knew getting up early would bite me in the end,” he muttered.

“To bed with you,” Nita said sternly, her tone brooking no argument. Ronan looked like he was about to start one anyway, and she added, “I’ll set up here and join you in a bit.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” She smiled sheepishly. “I want to check in on Kit anyway.”

“Oh, all right,” Ronan conceded around another yawn, confirming to Nita that she was completely right to send him to bed now. “Say hi to him for me.” He waved vaguely in her directly and slouched into the narrow corridor at the back of the observation room.

Nita sat down in front of the screens and watched the elegant lines of the Speech scroll across the screen. Everything was fine. Everything was exactly as it should be. Yet she still felt like she was missing something. She sighed in irritation and opened her manual to the messaging function, scrolled through the list of options, and hovered over ‘Rodriguez, Christopher K.’. All the names from Earth had an asterisk next to their name, indicating that Nita could only communicate with them aurally; a stark reminder of just how far away Nita was from home.

She pressed on Kit’s name and held her index finger in place as her manual made a connection with his. It took a long time, and when he finally greeted her static shaded his voice. He sounded a lot more alert this time though, less faint and dizzy, which was a good sign.

“You’re sounding better,” Nita said. “How are you feeling?”

“Better than you,” Kit replied. “You sound exhausted. Why are you still up?”

Nita laughed ruefully. “Sorry mom, I’ll go to bed soon.” Quieter, she added, “I just wanted to see how you were.”

“Missing you,” Kit said readily.

“Yeah, same. At least it’s not too long?”

“Yeah. Seven days.” Kit said nothing for a moment, but as Nita was about to ask him if he was still there, he added, “Just … don’t do anything too reckless.”

“First Ronan, and now you? We’ll be fine. It’s just a routine observation week. Nothing will go wrong.” As Nita said that, she realized how silly that was. Whenever a wizard said that, it was seen as a challenge to the Lone Power to demonstrate exactly how something could go wrong.

“Exactly,” Kit said. “We’ve been lucky so far, but I really don’t like how far apart we are right now. Just … take care, all right?”

“All right. I will.” Nita smiled. “Rest up, okay. I miss you.”

“I miss you too.”

The connection terminated, and Nita stretched out the kinks in her back. The screens reflected nothing unusual. _Everything’s fine,_ she told herself. _Everything is how it should be._ She stood up, shook her head at herself, and headed back into the sleeping bay.

The bay itself was sparse, with two disassembled cots pushed to one side and several containers that Nita suspected were their supplies for the week. Ronan had set his pup tent up in the far end of the room, tucked away in the furtherest corner from the surveillance equipment. It might have been out of courtesy to allow Nita enough space to set up her pup tent, but Nita wasn’t so sure.

 _Something to ask him about later,_ she mused as she assembled her pup tent. _Bobo, can you remind me?_

_Of course._

For now though, bed was a far more attractive prospect. _Wake me up in eight hours,_ she said as she crawled into bed. If Bobo replied, she didn’t hear it.

* * *

Nita couldn’t remember closing her eyes. She opened them and then had to close them against the glare. She was alone on a tundra, with her only company being the wind that howled in her ears. Despite the wind and the ice, she was perfectly comfortable in her oversized floppy shirt and loose pants, and the wind left her hair completely undisturbed. This was how she knew she was dreaming. She lifted her wrist up and was relieved to see that her charm bracelet was still there. Nita had been working on consciously bringing things into her dreams of late, and it was always nice to see progress. She triggered the spell embedded inside the little camera charm and felt the wizardry engage, recording everything she saw and heard.

“Hello?” she called as she walked along the icy surface. Her steps were sure despite the slick ice underfoot, and the ice was surprisingly warm on her bare feet. Though she didn’t recognize where she was, she knew where she was going, with the unconscious certainty of dreams. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

 _We have always been here,_ the wind replied. _And here is where we will stay. Do you see us, young Seer?_

Nita looked around her. The ice was not blue-white, as it should be, but instead luminescent as it stretched to the horizon, a frozen aurora borealis. She looked down at her feet, but all she saw was the ice and reflected starlight, and a dark shadow stretching out behind her. From this angle it looked like her shadow was trying to creep up on her unseen, freezing in place as she turned to look at it.

“I don’t understand,” Nita said. “What am I meant to see?”

 _Look deeper,_ the wind suggested.

“I don’t understand,” Nita grumbled as she tried to follow the wind’s suggestions. At first, she saw nothing. Then, as she stayed still, she realized that her shadow had changed. It had elongated, stretching up far above her like a long slender monster, its movements on the ice utterly independent of Nita’s. She stared in surprise, and then stumbled back in surprise as her shadow pushed itself off the ground like a sticker being pulled from a sheet. She took a step backwards, but it was impossibly fast, covering her eyes with its hands.

 _Do you see now?_ The wind was insistent. Nita pulled at the hands, but she couldn’t seem to get a purchase on them. Her fingers kept slipping through the hands into clammy stickiness, and her stomach twisted in revulsion. The more she struggled, more of her hand slipped into her shadow, making her feel weak and dizzy.

“I can’t see anything!” Nita protested. She couldn’t seem to get enough air, and felt herself being pulled slowly downwards by the shadow, which now had weight as well as substance. She thought she should struggle against it, but the mere act of thinking that was difficult enough. As it brought her down into the ice, it seemed easier to surrender. As she gave in, she heard the voices of thousands of people telling her it would be better this way, they should stay here forever where they were loved and understood, and she could stay here too if she wanted.

 _Now you understand,_ the wind said. _Now wake up._

Nita gasped and opened her eyes to the familiar canopy of her pup tent, her heart hammering in her chest, and tangled in her sweat-sodden bedsheets. _Bobo, did you get that?!_

 _I think so._ Bobo sounded uncharacteristically uncertain, and Nita frowned in concern.

_You think so?_

_That was a strange dream._

Nita deliberately held her breath and then let it go to try and settle her ragged breathing. “No kidding,” she said dryly. “Suffocated by my own shadow - not the way I thought I’d go.”

When her breathing settled further, Nita asked, “What was different about this one? It _felt_ different, but I’m not sure what it is.”

 _I don’t know either,_ Bobo offered sheepishly.

“Okay,” Nita said. “We’ll keep an eye on it.” She smiled then, exhausted but triumphant. “Also I dreamed my charm bracelet in intentionally this time. I’ll have to tell Tom and Carl when I get back.”

The triumph was short-lived, and Nita found herself staring at the ceiling of her pup tent, musing over what she had dreamed and trying to tease out some meaning from it. She carried this preoccupation with her through the morning and the rest of the day, making her a poor companion. It wasn’t until lunch time that she surfaced from the murky pool of her own thoughts to start talking to Ronan again. She apologized, and he waved it off with a shrug and a comment that he got it.

“It’s this place,” he offered over dinner, when Nita returned from telling Kit about her day. “It makes you think.”

It did. Nita just wasn’t sure what it was trying to make her think about. After all, the monitors made it clear that everything was fine, and nothing had changed, no matter how often she checked the monitor.

* * *

Three days in, and Nita was no closer to working out what her dream meant. She kept mulling over what it could mean, turning over aspects of it to see if this time she could divine some meaning to what she had seen, but that just resulted in her dreaming about walking into school naked without her homework. She didn’t need an oracular talent to understand what _that_ particular dream meant; modern psychology covered that quite well on its own.

She found herself spending more time staring gloomily at the screens displaying the stasis spell. She had wondered at first why the Llirillith had set up the monitoring station to begin with — after all, all the wizards she had known liked to get their hands dirty with the spell diagram itself — but now she suspected it was because going outside would be too much hassle. It was cold and lonely, and there was nothing to see there. After all, everything was as it should be.

Tonight, however, she wasn’t the only one unable to sleep. Ronan was leaning back on his chair in a way that was practically inviting fate to tip him backwards to crack his skull open, radiating enough frustration that it was driving Nita to distraction. He had a notebook in his lap with scrawled notes on it, but Nita couldn’t make heads of tails of it. She supposed that it was to do with his fish errantry thing, and that he had abandoned it to whatever was occupying his thoughts at the moment. She had hoped that at some point he would disclose to her what he was thinking about, but to date that hadn’t happened. Not that that was surprising; Ronan was never good at that kind of thing.

“You’ve been awfully quiet,” Nita observed when the tense silence had gone on too long to bear. “What’s on your mind?”

“Just thinking.”

Ronan’s tone didn’t invite further enquiry. Nita scowled at him, refusing to be cowed. Now that she had broached the conversation, she was certain that it was important.

“What about?” she probed when he didn’t say anything further.

For a moment, she thought that he was going to refuse to answer. He kept scowling at the screen in front of them as if it were hiding secrets from them, but he let his chair rock forward to rest with all four legs on the ground. “I keep thinking we’re missing something obvious.” The light from the screen cast strange shadows on his face. He looked tired, like he had been as restless a sleeper as Nita lately.

Ordinarily, Nita might have dismissed this idle thought, but honing her precognitive gift had meant a lot of considering what her subconscious was trying to tell her. The fact that her brain had suggested it merited further study, she thought, and considered what she knew. He was always up when she was, which was unusual for him as Kit was always complaining that Ronan slept in late. That was unusual, as was how quiet he was. Ronan was only ever this quiet if something was troubling him and he was trying to tease it out.

As she considered it, Nita decided that it was not ‘like’ he was as restless a sleeper as Nita at the moment. It was ‘because’ he was as restless as she was, and that troubled her. One disturbed wizard was cause for concern, but two was practically the Powers themselves screaming in their face that something was terribly wrong.

“You’re having weird dreams too?”

Her intuition was rewarded when Ronan jerked upright in surprise.

“I … yeah,” he said. He glanced at her sidelong before looking back at the screen. “I suppose that makes sense. You’ve always been the one who gets this kind of stuff. It’s been happening the last couple of nights.”

 _And I suppose I can’t tell him off, as I didn’t tell him about my dreams either…_ Nita thought. Maybe things would have moved faster if she had. _No use dwelling on it now, I suppose._

She turned her chair around to face him directly. “Well, two heads are better than one about this,” she said firmly. “Spill! Maybe together we can work out what’s going on here.”

Ronan shrugged noncommittally. “Maybe. What’s yours about?”

“I see what you’re doing there,” Nita said ruefully, “but all right.” She quickly relayed the details of her dream, sketching the encounter with her own shadow in broad brush strokes.

“That’s creepy,” Ronan said at the end of her summary.

“Isn’t it.” Nita raised her eyebrows meaningfully. “Now it’s your turn.”

For a moment, it looked like Ronan would never start talking. Then he sighed in obvious defeat, looking down and away from her. “All right, but it’s nothing like yours.” He cleared his throat. “I’m in the main business area of Dublin, walking down the street. There’s lots of people everywhere, lots of cars, lots of noise, but I can hear someone crying for something to stop. I look for them, but the crowd’s too thick and I can’t get through, and it’s getting harder to hear the crying. Finally, I can’t hear it at all and that’s when I know I’ve woken up.”

Nita wasn’t quite sure that she agreed that it was nothing like hers. Superficially they were nothing alike, of course, but that made sense. The dreams were for different wizards. It would make sense that their dreams would be different. But there were similarities as well: both involved them hearing a voice that was important somehow, and searching for something but not being able to find it. Working out what that meant though would be the hard task.

“That’s unsettling.”

Ronan nodded. “Any ideas what it means?”

Nita shook her head. “No idea. I’ve pretty much worked out that if I let it sit, the answer will come to me in time.”

“Or when you’re right in the middle of it,” Ronan added dryly and Nita gave him a cock-eyed look.

“Your life’s been saved by that, you know.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Ronan said easily. “It’s just … I don’t know. Don’t you think it’s lazy to just leave it to later on?”

“When you get a precognitive gift you can judge me,” Nita said primly. “Until then, answer me this: why does no one want to be here?”

She realized after she said it that she had left herself open for Ronan to come up with some flippant remark about how people didn’t want to be here because it was freezing cold, lonely, and unsettling. Instead, he seemed to take it seriously, lips pressed together as he thought about his answer.

“I think…” he started, and Nita waited for him to continue. “I think it’s because we don’t like being told what to think.”

Nita frowned. Now that he mentioned it, she had been thinking something very strange for the last few days. She’d been thinking that everything was fine and was how it should be, but she didn’t know that. She hadn’t checked it out for herself, and her reviews of the information on the monitoring screens had been cursory. She had been assuming that everything was fine. How did she know?

“You’ve been thinking that everything’s fine too…?” she asked slowly.

“Yeah. And isn’t that strange? I mean, you’d be the first one to stick your nose in a place it doesn’t belong. Why haven’t you done that yet?”

“I don’t do it all the time,” Nita said, “but I do agree that it’s weird. And we’ve only been here a few days.” A horrible thought dawned on her, and she swallowed hard against a lump of ice in her throat. “We’ve only been here a few days,” she said, her stomach clenching in horror. “What about the people who’ve been here all this time…?”

Ronan looked as sick as Nita felt. “Yeah. I was just thinking that. We should go have a look at the spell diagram. Make sure for ourselves that everything is fine, rather than relying on _this_ thing.” He emphasized his point by tapping his open hand on the top of the monitor. “I just don’t trust it.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

Nita stood up and brushed off her skirt. “Let’s do it now.”

“Now?” Ronan was standing up too, despite his protest, closing his notebook and putting it into his jacket pocket. Nita hoped to look at it later to see if she could come up with a solution for him, but for now she had other things on her mind.

“No better time than the present.” She was already checking through the variables she’d need to alter for her wizardry — more oxygen for the two of them, the air heated just so, shielding against unfavorable radiation wavelengths — as she knelt down with a sharpie to mark the floor with a spell circle. She had manipulated the chemical makeup of the ink earlier that month to make it easy to remove with a word, as while permanent marker can be quite useful for spell diagrams, spell diagrams drawn with permanent marker have a tendency to strain relationships between father and daughter.

She handed Ronan another sharpie so that he could do his half of the spell. She drew quickly, the sharpie squeaking against the metal floor. The Speech came easily to her — after all, she had been using it for quite some time now — and she was reviewing her spell notations while Ronan was still writing his name. _I suppose he wouldn’t get to use it as often as I do,_ Nita mused. The overlays in Ireland made this kind of wizardry rather difficult, but in terms of initial cost and effect afterward.

He finally finished, and they swapped positions to check each other’s drafting. Nita checked off the variables that Ronan had addressed against her own and found them consistent, the location was accurate, and though she wasn’t sure that she agreed completely with Ronan’s describing of himself it would be considered rude to offer suggestions at this point. _I’ll do it later,_ Nita said. _He’s not fooling anyone by pretending he doesn’t love the new Doctor Who series._

Once the two of them were satisfied, they stood in the centre of the circle. Now that the moment was upon them, Nita felt shivery, as if something very important was about to happen as a result of their choice. It was a feeling that Nita had become accustomed to in the course of her career as a wizard, and she found a strange degree of comfort in it now. Whatever happened at this point, it was due to a wizard choosing to intervene rather than simply letting something happen.

“Let’s go,” Nita said, and then they did.

* * *

Nita opened her eyes, exhaling sharply against the momentary weakness that comes with teleportation, to the icy landscape of her dreams. She told herself that she shouldn’t really be surprised, given that it was a precognitive dream. She was anyway, and then was surprised that she had not come out to have a look at the planet itself despite coming all this way. Now that she had, she took the opportunity to look around at the cool blue-white plain, interrupted by strange pillars that she thought might be Llirillith ruins.

Despite the fact that she and Ronan were protected from the cold and radiation by a sturdy forcefield, she found herself shivering. It wasn’t cold that caused her to shiver. The planet seemed terribly lonely and sad. It wasn’t a lifeless planet — Nita had been on enough of those to appreciate how strangely beautiful their stark landscapes were — but instead because this had once been a planet full of life that now lay sleeping underground. The weight of that sat on her chest, making it hard for her to breathe.

“This is … cool.”

Nita laughed, startled out of her thoughts by Ronan’s terrible joke. She looked across at him ruefully, and was rewarded by a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. He had known exactly what he was doing by breaking the tension.

“I am going to shove ice down your shirt if you make a joke that bad again,” Nita remarked, exaggerating her sigh for comedic effect.

“Fine, fine,” Ronan replied, sighing as well. He complained to no one in particular, “Why is it that no one appreciates my humor?”

“Because your jokes are terrible and you should feel bad for them,” Nita retorted. She scanned the landscape for the landmark that Mamvish had told them about: five jagged pillars reaching up into the sky like a hand clawing from the ground. At the time, Nita had found the description equal parts unsettling and amusing. Now, as her gaze lit on what she thought might be the landmark in question, she thought it looked strangely beautiful. Rather than being a zombie clawing itself from the grave, it was a hand reaching up to the stars to claim a new future. She nodded in the direction of the pillars and said, “There’s the marker for the spell diagram, I think.”

“That it is,” Ronan agreed.

The marker was a short distance away, enough that it would be wasteful to teleport over, and so Nita and Ronan bounce-walked over to it. Neither of them said anything. Nita wasn’t sure what had stilled Ronan’s tongue, but she felt peculiarly anxious. She scowled at her own nervousness and pushed on, coming to a slightly bouncy stop at the shortest of the pillars. Short was relative, as the pillar was still three times her height. She reached out and placed her hand on the slick surface and was surprised that it wasn’t cold. Instead it was warm to touch, heating up further as the quiescent wizardries embedded in it woke up. It finally lit up from base to top, and the spell diagram spooled out of it in long sinuous strands to form a circle around their feet.

Nita looked at the circle around them and gulped at the prospect of having to understand it all. She had done a lot of work with complex, subtle wizardries, as well as terrifyingly powerful ones, and thought that if she had enough time she could unravel this spell’s tricks as well. However, they were so far away from home. It was a daunting prospect, though as she considered the thought she wasn’t sure why. After all, Nita had been off world countless times, been in far stickier situations, and they hadn’t unnerved her like this.

 _Start at the beginning,_ she told herself, and pulled at the first strand. _Don’t assume anything just yet, just take it all in._

She felt, rather than saw, Ronan pick up another strand to read. From the muttered comments, most of which Nita assumed were profane, he wasn’t making much headway. At first, Nita didn’t either. As she read more, she started to understand how the Llirillith had thought. The language they used to describe their stasis was strangely circular, looping back and forth like backstitching. Nita hadn’t been very good at backstitching when she had tried to learn, but as she read, forward-back-forward, she thought that she understood them. She read every strand she could get her hands on, and through it learned what the Llirillith had valued.

She stopped, perturbed, at the way the Llirillith described their connection with their planet. It was the first time that Nita had seen that particular incarnation of ‘love’ used, one which suggested that the species would literally die without their planet’s love. There were of course species who were so deeply tied to their planet that they could not live away from it. Her understanding of rafting, however, was that it had to be consented to by the species of question. She would have thought that such consent would be impossible for a species this linked to their planet. And yet, here it was written in the Speech, surrounded by the subtle, sophisticated spellwork that was Mamvish’s signature.

She read the section again, chewing on the edge of her thumbnail.

“This doesn’t look right,” she said to Ronan.

He stopped what he was doing and looked over her shoulder.

“I’m with you there,” he said finally. “Mamvish’s life would be a lot easier if she could just force people into accepting stasis. Maybe their name changed?” He shook his head dismissively. “No, that doesn’t make sense either. How could they change their names in stasis? That kind of change doesn’t just happen spontaneously.”

It was the use of the word spontaneous that made Nita think. A shadow, peeling away and gaining a life of its own. A lost child crying with no one to hear it. A cry for help in response to a presence that was always there, but had gained a malevolent life of its own.

 _The Llirillith would have needed help to change their name,_ Nita thought with a degree of sick horror, _and Someone sure would do it for them._ It was a horrible thought. It was a plausible thought. She didn’t want to say it aloud, but Nita had never lacked for courage.

“I think someone — or Someone — has changed their species’ name while they were asleep…”

Nita expected Ronan to dismiss her. Instead, he just looked thoughtful. “Why’s that?”

Now thats she had worked out what was going on, it was obvious that the name in the spell was different. Where Mamvish would use one word, another, subtly different, word was used. Where Mamvish would allow space very slight boundaries were placed. It was an intricate maze designed to guide a species towards one particular conclusion over a period of decades.

“This,” she said, and highlighted the changes. “This wasn’t written by them, but by someone else.”

“Huh,” Ronan said. He shrugged. “I’ll take your word on that. I believe you, I just can’t see it for myself.”

“It’s obvious now,” Nita muttered. “It’s been working on everyone who comes here, even us, trying to force us to think in certain ways.”

“I suppose all you can do now is tell them yourself, while yelling at them for being so ridiculous,” Ronan said.

Nita was quick to notice the use of the singular. “Me?” she said. “Why aren’t you going? I would have thought you’d jump at the chance of making some sardonic remark about them.”

Ronan looked around them, tense in a way Nita hadn’t seen from him in some time. Not since the desperate search for the Hesper, she realized.

“I think one of us needs to stay alert out here,” he said, looking to the horizon. “Call me paranoid, but this has all been a wee bit too easy, you know?”

“Yeah,” Nita said heavily. “I do know.” She looked across at him. “Are you sure you’ll be all right? You could always try and talk them around.”

Ronan snorted. “What, and deny you the right to yell at them? Perish the thought!”

Nita sighed in exaggerated disgust. “I try to look out for you and this is what I get!”

“Good luck,” Ronan said, entirely sincerely. That made Nita’s stomach clench in anxiety, because whenever Ronan was serious that never ended well.

“Thanks,” she said. She reached forward and pressed the five pillars in order of smallest to largest, and then closed her eyes at the upcoming perception shift. _Best I get started now, before I get too nervous!_

* * *

Nita had half-expected to open her eyes to the Llrillith civilization as it was alive, full of sound and color and people milling around angular buildings, full of life and joy. Instead, she opened her eyes to a bright, cool light. She squinted against the glare, and as her eyes adjusted, she thought she could make out a humanoid about the height of a small child, made entirely of starlight. The light dimmed, leaving only the figure, still glowing with the bright, cool light of the stars.

 _A child?_ Nita wondered. The form did look like a juvenile Llirillith, after all. _Interesting. I wonder what it means._

“Hello,” she offered. “I’m a wizard.”

The starchild nodded. “Yes. Both of you are.”

“You know about Ronan? That makes this easier then.”

“We know about all the wizards who come to visit here.”

Nita frowned at the use of the plural. She supposed that it made sense that the consciousness of the Llirillith had formed a gestalt here, at the heart of the rafting effort. She supposed it may make sense to them about why they thought of themselves as a child. It was just startling, especially as Nita had read all of the material about them before accepting the assignment, and none of this was mentioned.

“That’s … I guess that makes sense.” She took a breath to steel herself. “So you know why wizards come here?”

The starchild nodded again, and this time Nita could have sworn she had a sense of it smiling wryly. “Oh yes,” it agreed readily. “We think it’s a waste of time, but we appreciate the sentiment.”

“A waste of time?” Nita thought she understood what was going on; the Lone Power must have told them that it was a waste of time. She couldn’t browbeat them into accepting that she was right, but she could try and convince them once she understood them. “Why would you say that?”

“Because, we are the children of Llrille.” The word that the starchild used to describe itself was one that Nita had only read about in her studies of the Speech, suggesting a deep connection with their planet that went soul-deep, and suggested that they truly were the children of the planet. It was a deeper connection even than the one that had given her pause earlier, but she was committed now and so pressed on. She had to try, after all. This just didn’t seem right to her.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help,” she said firmly. “It doesn’t matter where you’re from. Wizards help anyone who needs it.”

“That’s not it.” The starchild sounded old and tired, but resolute. “We don’t want your help. We want to be left alone with our mother.”

This all did not make any sense to Nita. They had consented to the rafting effort. They wanted to leave at the time. Why had that changed? She couldn’t see what she had missed, let alone what every other wizard before her had missed. If the Lone Power was here, It was being uncommonly subtle about it. The starchild seemed confident about the decision they had made, as if it had been a carefully considered one, but that didn’t mean anything. The Lone Power was good at subverting clever decisions after all.

Nita mulled over what she knew, only to have her thought process interrupted by Ronan calling her name.

_What is it?_

_Whatever you’re doing, either do it a lot faster or stop it._ Ronan sounded tense and unhappy, and Nita got a sense he was listening to something else as well as her. She strained to hear it, but it was just out of hearing and all she could hear was the shape of the words.

_What’s wrong?_

_They’re trying to send us straight home._

Nita looked wildly at the starchild, who showed no sign of strain, only determination. _What? But — we’re across the galaxy! Can they do that?_

Ronan laughed. It wasn’t very amused. _You want to tell them that they can’t?_

“What are you doing?” Nita demanded. “We are _not_ going home.”

“This is our time. It is not yours.”

 _Think, think, what do I need?_ She remembered Ronan saying, glancing at the screen to avoid looking at her _I can hear someone crying for something to stop._ She had thought that it was the species itself, crying out for someone to listen to them while the Lone Power convinced them to do something they didn’t want to do. Now, confronted by a child made of starlight insisting that they truly did and believing it, Nita realized that she had had it all wrong. It wasn’t that the Lone Power had influenced them. It was that they weren’t listening to what was right in front of them.

She closed her eyes to listen, ignoring Ronan calling her name, ignoring the starchild’s attention. The planetary kernel was smaller than she was used to, worn out and cool, but now that she was listening for it Nita could not understand how she could not have heard it before now. Normally kernels did not have a consciousness, not how Nita would see it. This one did, shaped by a species’ fervent belief in it, and it was frantic with worry about how its children were doing the wrong thing. It was tied to every Llirillith in stasis, a soul-deep connection that now that Nita saw it, she couldn’t understand how the Llirillith could not hear it.

Though, she supposed that was the point. After all, their planet was dying. Grief made you do terrible, awful things. Nita had raged at the universe, wept at the unfairness of it all, after her mother died. The Llirillith, tied as they were to their planet, may have found it all too painful to spend time with their planet and then move on. They would have ignored their planet’s cries, choosing instead to follow it into Timeheart when it’s time came.

That was something too painful to bear for their planet. And now that Nita could hear it, it was too painful for her to bear as well. Her throat closed up in sympathy grief, and she understood why it had to be her here, at this time and place.

“If you won’t listen to me, perhaps you’ll listen to this,” Nita said, and reached for the planetary kernel. It was cool to the touch, though as she held it in her cupped hands she could feel the residual warmth nestled in its core. The starchild sighed in painful longing and reached out for the kernel before stopping itself.

“I get it, I think,” Nita said, holding the kernel in her hands. “My mother died too. But I know that she wouldn’t have wanted me to join her in Timeheart just yet. There’s too many things she would have wanted me to do.”

She stepped forward and gave the kernel to the starchild. “Listen to your planet. What does it want you to do with your lives?”

The starchild could easily use the kernel to send Nita and Ronan home, despite Ronan’s stubbornness. It could destroy its planet in a heartbeat, killing all of them in one fell swoop. It could do so many terrible things now that it had its’ planet’s heart in its hands. Instead, it cradled the kernel to its chest and keened over it.

“I’m sorry,” Nita said. “I wish you had more time with your mother. But don’t waste the time you have with her, all right?”

Nita turned away and left the two of them alone to make their choice.

* * *

Nita opened her eyes. She breathed a sigh of relief at the icy landscape because it was not familiar, but instead the landscape of Llirille. It seemed that her plan had worked. She reached out to the kernel, and was satisfied that things were as they should be. This time, things really were as they should be. She breathed a shaky sigh of relief. 

“Welcome back,” Ronan said, pushing himself off from where he had leaned against the second shortest pillar. “I trust that you yelled at them?”

“I did not yell at them,” Nita said.

“You didn’t? Are you sure you’re not Nita Callahan then? The Nita I know would never miss an opportunity to speak truth to power, especially painful truths.”

Nita scowled at him.

“You know, you had me worried there when they were trying to send us back,” he went on. “I wondered what had happened.”

“They were going to make a dumb decision. I think I worked it out.” She reached her hands up to the sky, blocking out the cool dim star with her hands. “Here’s what I don’t understand though. They’re really close-knit to it. And I couldn’t see any suggestion that the Lone Power had interfered with their connection. Why didn’t they listen to their planet? They must have known it was wrong.”

Ronan shrugged, hands in his pockets. “Maybe,” he said noncommittally.

“Maybe?” Nita side-eyed him. No one looked that unsettled unless they knew a painful truth they didn't want to share. “Come on. You know something.”

“I don’t know something, it’s just a theory.” Ronan cleared his throat. “Sometimes, the Lone Power can talk to you in a way that you yourself don’t know is going on, and if it happens enough it just becomes your new normal. Maybe that happened to them.”

“You think so?” Nita wondered whether this was why he had been distracted earlier. “Is that what happened to you before?”

Ronan looked startled. “How’d you know?”

“Figures. What did it say?”

Ronan looked profoundly uncomfortable. “It just suggested that everything had a time and place, and this wasn’t ours.”

Nita wasn’t sure if this was everything, but she decided to leave it lie for the time being. It’d been a long day after all, and there was time enough to work out what this particular version of the Lone Power meant for life in the universe. If there was one constant in a wizard's life, it was that the Lone Power would inevitably show up at some point. Nita could ask It then. Maybe It would even answer.

“We should tell Mamvish what happened,” she said instead, and Ronan nodded.

Nita looked back at the five jagged pillars as Ronan began to set up the teleportation wizardry back to their base. _Thank you,_ she thought she heard, the old, weary voice of the planetary kernel speaking to her one last time.

 _Thank you,_ she thought back. _I’m glad we could help._


End file.
